Category: Iceland
Written by: Mark E Smith, Steve Hanley, Marc Riley, Craig Scanlon
Studio releases:
Hex Enduction Hour
The Fall: 1982
This song was recorded in the country which gives its name to the title.
From Melody Maker; 26 September 1981
“Right, no dicking about, let’s get set up – we’ve wasted enough money already,” Mark Smith yells at at his “lads” as we shamble into the recording studio.
“What’s he going to do, then?” asks Tony, the English engineer” Don’t ask me – he never tells anyone what he’s doing.” says Kay, watching assorted Falls tinkling abstractly on various instruments.
The Fall eventually rattle out two tracks – the mildly funky “Look Know” and the weird haunting “Hip Priest” – both on first takes. Everyone holds their breath on playback and looks expectantly at Mark, who’d been pacing the floor outside. Mark just mutters “it’s okay”, and we all start grinning.
Mark then announces they will try a new song. Craig patters out a tune on the piano, Marc Riley starts to play banjo, making it sound like a sitar, and you suddenly recognise the abstract tinkering they’d done earlier. “Is he going to sing?” asks the engineer. Kay didn’t know. Grant goes to find out. “He’s going to play a cassette first, and then he’s going to sing,” says Grant. The engineer scarcely blinks. “I see,” he says. “A cassette. I do like these easy sessions.”
Mark plays his cassette – of the wind howling against his hotel room window – and launches into the verbals… “To be humbled in Iceland … sing of legend sing of destruction…witness the last of the Godmen…hear about Megas Jonsson…to be humbled in Iceland…sit in the gold room…fall down flat in the Cafe Iol…without a glance from the clientele…the coffee black as well…and be humbled in Iceland…”
No, we didn’t know what he was going to do either,” says Riley in a state of euphoria later. “He just said he needed a tune, something Dylanish, and we knocked around on the piano in the studio and came up with that. But we hadn’t heard the words until he suddenly did them. We did ‘Fit And Working’ on ‘Slates’ in exactly the same way.Yeah, I suppose it is amazing really…”
Mark E Smith, in an interview published in The Quietus:
“Because in them (sic) days Iceland was a closed country not like it is now. They didn’t have rock bands and beer was illegal and stuff like that. So we did a show there and it was a big deal for them. It was ridiculous; a quarter of the population of Rekyjavik turned out to see us. Women, children, the lot. They’d never seen a group like us before. So me being me I said ‘Let’s record something here.’ And we went and recorded Iceland and Hip Priest in this lava cave. It was where Icelandic bards go to record their Icelandic poems. That’s why the sound on those tracks has that snap on it.”
The only recorded performance of the track by the group in concert is hardly the song at all, but rather a different riff with the following lines from the studio version: “I did not feel for my compatriots / Hated even the core of myself / Cast the runes for your own soul”…before MES says, “We are The Fall” and starts singing some lyrics from Fortress. Whether the full lyrics and the music for Iceland had been written at the time of the gig is unknown.
From The Big Midweek, by Steve Hanley and Olivia Pierkarski, Route, 2014; page 103: “Iceland is second on the set list, but after a thorny minute of trying to re-create it we are forced into defeat.”
There is an essay on thiis track in Mark E Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics”, (Ashgate, 2010) entitled “Humbled in Iceland”:On Improvisation during The Fall (Robin Purves):
Purves attempts to analyse this Hex Enduction Hour track while at the same time examining the nature of improvisation itself. Iceland, he says, “assumes its identity by unapologetically representing recognizably ‘rock’ sounds without particularly being reminiscent of the noise any other band tends to make.” A long attempt is made to show how the musicians on the track are influenced by MES’s voice, and vice versa; and of how various moods exist throughout the song, from tension to expectation to ambivalence. Purves compares it to tracks such as Can’s Mother Sky or The Velvet Underground’s Black Angel’s Death Song and European Son, but concludes that Iceland goes beyond these due to the “extraordinary amount of variation within its relentless repetition.